Older blog entries for atai (starting at number 21)

raph, GNU Ghostscript will continue, and hopefully some compromise can be reached so your GPL version can continue to be GNU Ghostscript.

Seen on a mailing list:

From Tom Lord, lord@emf.net

>From the "nothing to lose" dept.:

 
 
 Look, gawdamnit, I have 170K+ lines of really excellent free software
here, available for review, which I developed over the past 10 years.
Users of my current primary project universally love it, and rank it
higher than all competitors.  I know a heck of a lot, about a lot of
things, a few in considerable depth.  Yes, in some contexts, this
being one, my email persona is informally ranked as "arrogant ass",
but in person, and considering the larger evidence, I'm charming and
interesting, and people who bother to dig into my technology recognize
that I have a heck of a lot to contribute.  In a few days (< 5) I'll
be, at _best_ homeless.  I really don't get an FSB industry that
collectively decides to simply discard capable people.

 
 
 So, uh, a little help here?

 
 
 -t

This was sent by Tom Lord, author of Arch and some other excellent Free Software packages (many scheme related). He needs help. Hopefully some people in the Free Software community (especially these in the Silicon Valley/Bay area in California) can come to his aid through this difficult time.

Happy Chinese GNU year!

Raph: It is WxWindows, not Wx...

Free (libre) Software movement in Taiwan

It seems not well known in the English-speaking community, that there is a very active Free Software movement in Taiwan. For people who speak Chinese, you may be interested in the large amount of technical and advocacy material in Chinese, accessible from

http://www.softwareliberty.org/, the website of the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan,

including introduction to Free Software concepts, translations of the GPL and other GNU documents, proposed plans of government Free Software initiatives, Chinese computing information and Chinese software.

The human was wrong. The computers were actually right. If the pilot had trusted his machine, the lives would have been saved. Computers are more consistent and trustworthy?

Source-based distribution as add-on to "standard" distribution?

Is there a way to add one source-based GNU/Linux distribution as an add-on layer to a more standard one like Red Hat? By that I mean the source distribution must not "conflict" with the files from the standard distribution. For example, GARNOME allows GNOME 2 to be installed in nonstandard directories on top of Red Hat, Debian, or whatever. The advantage of this is that the "standard" system do not get touched, preserving the original distribution environment in case anything goes wrong with development stuff. So what is Red Hat's, leave it to them, and just update following their releases.

If a GARNOME-like system can be established to include most packages, with dependency-tracking like in source-based distributions, then we can enjoy the benefits of conveniently accessing the latest sources while remaining compatible with the older, but stable, distributions. Kind of like layering Gentoo on top of Red Hat. This assumes enough drive space is available and is not meant for glibc or kernel hackers.

Research

How to do research? To answer this question, one has to do research on how to do research. And how to improve methods of doing research? More research on the research process is needed. These are hard problems.

Universal

badvogato: Isn't "there is no universal answer" universal?

Remarks on bytes removed.